Dream folk singer Marissa Nadler @ Róisín Dubh

MARISSA NADLER is something of a Renaissance woman. She is a singer, songwriter, illustrator, and painter, who plays the Róisín Dubh on Friday December 3 at 9pm.

Boston based Marissa studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design but it was songwriting that appealed to her most.

She is a self taught guitarist, who as a teenager learned to play in a style the ‘cotton picking style, where you play a steady bass pattern with the thumb and filling out syncopated rhythms with the index finger.

Her vocal style has received much acclaim with Pitchfork saying it was “a voice you would follow straight into Hades”, while The Boston Globe said Marissa “has a voice that, in mythological times, could have lured men to their deaths at sea, an intoxicating soprano drenched in gauzy reverb that hits bell-clear heights, lingers, and tapers off like rings of smoke. Hardly anyone considers Nadler a folk musician.”

Critics have described Marissa’s music ‘dream folk’, but also as American Gothic since her debut album Ballads of Living and Dying (2004 ), featured her setting of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Annabelle Lee’ to music.

Since then she has released three further albums; The Saga of Mayflower May (2005 ), Songs III: Bird on the Water (2007 ), and Little Hells (2009 ). Pitchfork described Little Hells as “elegiac and elegant” and said it contained “10 of Nadler’s best songs yet”.